German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

Post by wahnfrieden » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 9:16 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #38

nostromo wrote: post #25

It's unclear to me who provided the print-out of Jana's private messages. Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security. I hired a Canadian once under a TN NAFTA "visa" and he had to bring some correspondence from me to the border. We had to be very careful to word things correctly and not to use specific words that could prevent him from coming to the US. It seems that th…

A friend of a friend (I know, I know) was stopped on the border between Canada and the US, and had her possessions searched. Inside they found her diary, which detailed her life and job in New York- which she shouldn't have had, because she was repeatedly entering the country on a tourist visa. She was rejected at the border. This may well be the same- even if the girl did not intend to show those messages to the bor…

Post by rl3 » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 9:17 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #25

It's unclear to me who provided the print-out of Jana's private messages. Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security. I hired a Canadian once under a TN NAFTA "visa" and he had to bring some correspondence from me to the border. We had to be very careful to word things correctly and not to use specific words that could prevent him from coming to the US. It seems that th…

Post by killerpopiller » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #44

wtvanhest wrote: post #6

This story seems highly unlikely to be true given the following 4 assumptions: 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program. 2) Giving the data to a large number of border guards would have increased the chance of its dissemination. 3) It would be unnecessary to show her the data to refuse her admission to the US and showing her would violate #2. 4) She would not be a valuable enough target to e…

The publicly viewable Facebook message theory sounds more plausible given that (i) plenty of people seem to have little concept of what is and isn't private in Facebook and (ii) the US does have a track record of denying people entry based on public social media posts: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-... Chances are they got a tipoff or she got caught by profiling or a random check as I do…

Post by icebraining » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 9:21 PM UTC

1morepassword wrote: post #39

doktrin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It sounds utterly implausible on just about every conceivable level.

What's the "utterly implausible" part? In the past we've had verified incidents of people being refused entry because of things posted on for instance public Twitter feeds. So we know that the monitoring of social media, collating that with the identity of incoming travelers and passing that on to officials at the border is an existing practice. We also know that once monitoring starts for one purpose, it rapidly exp…

Post by winter_blue » Tue, Jun 11, 2013, 9:23 PM UTC

rdouble wrote: post #29

Tenoke wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that the authorities are using their access to her facebook messages for something so trivial and this openly (if they actually did). Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

The USCIS reviews Facebook for those applying for long term visas, to prevent fraud. It doesn't have anything to do with the NSA.